Claire On The Move

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

In the past more-than-a-year, I have moved a lot...mostly away from things. It reminds me of a conversation I had with J, at the end of our marriage, when he shouted at me that he thought I was always running away from things -- although I think he was wrong, since most of my life has been spent moving TOWARDS things.

I moved away from Montreal, and my concept of home here. When I lived here in 2012-2014, I was pretty broke and pretty flexible. I had a cheap apartment that was in relatively good repair and close to two metro lines, a great housemate, and the freedom to travel whenever I could afford it. Turns out, when your rent is only $350 a month, you can go a lot more places than if your rent is more than that.

So I left Montreal and I was sad about it, especially because Vancouver seemed so...heartless. Not in a cold way, although it did remind us of the Seattle Freeze, but in that it seemed to have no central pulsing soul. There were some mountains (beautiful!) and some ocean (also beautiful!) and we went for long walks down by the water and talked about how it would be nice to have some more friends someday, and about Erik's work and the way it seemed to have turned sour. It turned so sour that we had to leave, again -- we left and went back to Montreal, and I learned you can't go home again.

Montreal between 2012 and 2014 was the closest I came to feeling like I had identified a home...but coming back to it, I am a different person, and it is no longer my home. Montreal is a great place to live when you're broke...but as a more adult person, in need of an adult apartment (with, you know, functional wiring and no holes in the walls where babies could stick things and also stairs that are not dangerous or precipitous and also no mold or floor tiles coming up or broken glass or a doorknob that only works by pulling a string from the upstairs hallway or walls that go all the way to the ceiling or no enormous slant to the floors or foundational cracks in the walls) in a relatively nice area, and earning an actual adult income? Montreal SUCKS. It is a pile of expensive bureaucracy. We have been deemed to be making a ton of money, so of course we pay large sums of it back to Quebec in taxes. We get some subsidies for childcare and so on...which are then taxed. Basically just...expensive, difficult, frustrating. This is not to mention the language politics constantly infringing on our lives (for example, you would think that, when English is 50% of the official languages of the country wherein your cafe is located, and the cafe is also located inside a building rented entirely by a company whose official language is English, taking a stand against the English language by refusing to allow the employees of your cafe to speak it to their customers might be ridiculous).

So Montreal isn't really home anymore. It's okay. But E feels intensely uncomfortable here and doesn't want to stay -- and even if he did, the way Quebec politics are set up for permanent residency, we can't stay, because he doesn't speak enough French. So we have to leave Quebec sometime in the next few years anyway. No sense getting too settled, since this can't be our home. In some ways, I wondered why I bothered to paint the walls of our house, since we'd probably be leaving anyway? But I hear this is what makes one more adult, and honestly, a more effective traveler: nesting wherever you are, making home from pieces, again and again.

I also found myself moving so far away from my idea of who I was, this year -- almost-year, as baby is now almost 9.5 months old. I thought of myself as an activist, an outgoing friendly person who liked to talk to people, someone who is creative and crafty, enjoys going to interesting events. Now, I find myself almost a recluse -- even when I can manage to go out to something, I feel overwhelmed and uncomfortable, and if the baby is there, my attention revolves around her needs. If the baby isn't there, I sometimes don't know what to do with myself. I don't do much activism right now...I don't do many crafts. Sometimes I think it's just sleep deprivation interfering with my ability to connect with my interests, and sometimes I think maybe it is some kind of postpartum depression and sometimes I think no, this is just what this is like for now. This is probably temporary, like all things with children. One day they sleep, the next day, not. One day I have no interests, and the next day, I once again find myself bookbinding, writing, sewing, traveling the 45 minutes by metro to work in the art hive.

I also am redefining my yoga practice, which dropped off precipitously in the last few months of my pregnancy and has really never recovered. For years I had a regular daily yoga practice, and then I got too large to enjoy it and so I stopped. And then for the first few months after baby was born, the idea of doing anything other than watching TV on the couch underneath this tiny helpless person was anathema. And then I found myself uncertain, tentative -- the way I feel about talking to people: it seems like a good idea to do, but then when I actually do it, I don't find the joy in it that I used to.

I think I need to ground myself into regular practices: find daily routines, make a point of making something, doing something, stretching my body, every day. Put the baby on my back and go, go, go...to somewhere. To myself, maybe, wherever that may be.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Almost a full year since the last time I updated, which is not to say the travel stopped. Nope, where did I go after July 29, 2013?

I spent August, 2013 helping my mother complete her move to Prince Edward Island. Tiny red-dirt homeland, she finally bought the house she wanted and we shifted her stuff cross country and settled her into a place right behind where the Seatreat Restaurant used to be (for anyone who keeps track of Island locational methodologies..."that's where USED to be"is a common direction, and woe betide anyone who hasn't lived on the Island for twenty years). I volunteered for Art in the Open and saw Monica and Betty Jo's fantastic art projects: a dilapidated house in the woods, a set of teacups. Someone else brought a field of lit balloons under the stars of the waterfront...someone else led me in a commitment ceremony to my understanding of impermanence. It was a mini-Burning Man, before...

Beardy Erik, on our first official date

At the end of August, I went to Burning Man. On... Thursday? Of Burning Man, a bald man with a beard driving a mo'ai art car called my name through a megaphone and I started a whole new kind of trip that I had no idea I was starting. More on that in a bit.

At the beginning of September, I stayed in San Francisco a few days (previously mentioned bald man may have played a role in this) and then flew back to Montreal. Shortly after my arrival, Ray turned up...then Zach.

A few days after Zach left, I flew back to PEI to present a poster at the Canadian Sex Researcher's Conference. That first weekend in October is a gorgeous time to be on the Island, in case you're wondering. The tourists are mostly gone and the trees are sharp and beautiful, and it was certainly weird being there at almost exactly the time that I was when Anthony first made his appearance a year earlier. Now he only shows up in my thoughts as a bad example, but it was surreal having no feelings left about him whatsoever. Time heals all wounds something something.

When I was in SF, I went to Arlette's

Days after I got back, I flew to San Francisco. That bald guy, again.

A few days after getting back, my lovely wife joined me in Montreal...then my friend Dustin, on his way to Jordan to go hiking with his dad. Then I went to Toronto to see Sky again. This is into October still.

November, I spent the first weekend and part of the second week in New York City with Marcus, walking across Manhattan about sixteen times, visiting Kazuki, and playing would-you-rather over obnoxiously large pizza slices in the Village. Two days after coming back, I flew back to SF. Bald guy really seems to be having an impact.

December was lowkey: a trip to Toronto early in the month, and a trip to PIttsburgh for New Year's, a week of visiting old friends and new, kissing the bald guy at midnight, and making some promises we intend to spend this year fulfilling.

I spent most of January in SF, except for the weekend we drove to LA. The second weekend in February was a trip to Kitchener/Waterloo, and weeks later, bald guy showed up on my doorstep. In March, first I went to Toronto, then to Charlottetown for a week. Then I miraculously didn't go anywhere until the first week of April, when I went to Toronto. Then Vancouver for about 5 days.

New project!

Now I'm back in Montreal, preparing for the next trip: Sweden, then Kill Devil Hills, NC...then Vancouver. Bald guy and I started a whole different kind of trip. That one both already started and will be starting in October.

So the weird thing about saying goodbye to Montreal as I prepare to move to Vancouver with Erik and an extra third of a person, is wrapping up all of my ties to different communities and groups. Friends have already traded contact details or outlined the need to pay a trip to Vancouver. But some people will never know where I went and probably won't remember me, like the guy who's always behind the counter at the little Arabic grocery store I go to like every three days because I'm always forgetting to buy bread or another bag of unsweetened dried mangoes (how many bags of those do you need? Turns out, a lot). Other people -- like my regular meditation group or the other students in my twice-weekly yoga classes -- will probably sort of remember that I was there fondly but never really make an effort to find out where I am or what happened to me. "Remember Claire with the pink hair?" Ingrid from yoga who gives me all her cool pants might say. "I wonder what the heck ever happened to her?"

Good point

But all these tiny communities: the meditation group, the yoga class...the community art space and the vegan commune in the old church rectory and my friend Chris's band and the places I do regular figure modeling. I've been slowly taking my leave of them, giving hugs and saying goodbyes and just gently realizing I probably won't see most of these Facebook friends again.

For some reason, leaving Montreal seems more permanent than leaving Australia did. For example, I still seem to have it in my head that I will definitely see my Australian friends again, even though that is significantly more unlikely than visiting friends who live RIGHT HERE in the same country. The mind is weird. But despite not having lived here for very long, Montreal feels pretty home-like to me, so it's weird to be deliberately leaving the place. Even if it does have some truly weird issues about mafia corruption and language stuff. But I find those endearing, at least until a chunk of concrete overpass crushes my skull and the bureaucrats shrug in typical Quebecois fashion and say "Whoops!"

As if wanting to make me less sad about leaving, though, I received a series of requests from Revenu Quebec for copies of my Quebec provincial taxes from 2012. Which I did not file, because I moved to Quebec on December 11, 2012, and did not earn any money in the remaining 20 days of the taxable year. Which I explained to Revenu Quebec, but they were uninterested, preferring instead to believe that I did not understand what they wanted due to my poor French skills. Ah, Quebec.

Monday, July 29, 2013

After my whirlwind trip to San Francisco with my wife Sky, a trip that would have gone down in infamy as one of the worst trips I have ever taken if I had not had several other really terrible travel experiences recently, I thought I would list my top worst travel experiences.

Returning from Thailand in June 2012. I had a cheap one-way ticket on Air India from Bangkok to Toronto, with one stopover in New Delhi. While the plane was aloft, Air India went on strike, and we landed in New Delhi to discover that all onward planes had been cancelled. A harried-looking man took away all our passports and bundled them together with a rubber band and then put us onto a shuttle bus that took us to a building that could either have been an enormous hotel past its prime or a moldering mental institution, where we would wait for about 14 hours until they could find another plane to take us...somewhere. When we got to the airport, I discovered my trip home would now take me through Paris (where we all had to get off the plane, go back through security, and then get back on the plane...in 45 minutes) and New York before finally arriving in Toronto. The trip that was supposed to take 22 hours actually ended up taking 40+, although the food on Air India is delicious and I made friends with the only other person also going to Toronto: a professional deep sea diver that Air India apparently thought was my husband, because they kept seating us next to each other.

Train from Fes to Marrakech in May 2013. Seven hour train ride. Five of those hours spent with an earsplitting high-pitched feedback noise emitting from the train's PA system. You could watch everybody's face contort after the first half hour on the train. The only way I made it through was with earplugs.

Toronto to San Francisco, July 2013. Yeah, it makes it in there, for sure. We took the Greyhound to Buffalo -- Greyhound's website estimates it will take 3 hours, but the bus driver told us that was completely wrong; it always takes longer. This time it took even longer: we got stuck in stop-and-go traffic for an extra hour, meaning we arrived at the Buffalo airport 20 minutes before our plane was supposed to depart. We sprinted to the gate...only to discover that our plane hadn't left Baltimore, and would be leaving for Chicago two hours late. This meant we'd miss our connector to Oakland, but when we tried to rebook the tickets, the very nice lady at customer service said rebooking was impossible as her system showed that our flight to Oakland was delayed and we would be able to make it. In the air on the way to Chicago, the flight attendant reassured us that we had definitely missed our flight to Oakland...but there was a flight going to SFO leaving 20 minutes after we were set to touch down and it had three standby seats left. The minute we hit the tarmac, I called Southwest and they reissued boarding passes for the SFO flight, and Sky and I sprinted to the new gate. After a $100 taxi ride from SFO to where we were staying in Oakland, a) Southwest lost Sky's bag and wouldn't tell her where it was for three days, and b) BART went on strike for the first time in 17 years. Also when I got home, I discovered my cell phone provider charged me $1.50 a minute in international roaming fees for all the frantic calls we'd made to Southwest trying to rebook tickets. Air travel in the U.S.: it's the gift that keeps on giving.

I do not remember the details perfectly, but I do remember being 12 years old and in Europe with my mom, and a flight cancellation or delay resulted in our being stuck in Charles de Gaulle airport for an extra ten hours worth of layover. I am sure that travelling with a pre-pubescent dork could not have been fun for my mom, and I was bored out of my skull. To this day, I have a strange aversion to CDG.

Guatemala, 2008. My friend Colleen and I, certain we knew what we were doing, were baffled by the lack of direct service from Panajachel to Tikal -- all the buses went back south several hours and had a layover in Guatemala City. So we decided to travel the way the locals do: on increasingly tinier minibuses, heading into increasingly more dangerous road. Eventually we wound our way along a road that was unfinished; deserted construction equipment nestled against the edge of the mountain on one side, and our tires slipped along the gravel road as we peered out the side window down the sheer drop that did not seem to faze the driver. We had a full load, including some people sitting on other people's laps, and I was wedged so tightly between Colleen and the guy sitting next to me, it was hard to raise my arms to cover my eyes when the tires occasionally ran off the road. Then it started to get dark. And rain. We got there eventually, but it took a very long time and probably several years off my lifespan.

Cozumel, 2006? I don't remember exactly when this was, but in an effort to bolster my dying marriage, I booked a 6-day package holiday to Cozumel, with the reasoning that, hey, I'd never been on a package tour before. Our flight from Pittsburgh to Houston was delayed...and delayed...and further delayed by a mechanical error which turned out to be a problem with the windshield wipers. So we left super late and couldn't make up any time en route...which meant we were left with 15 minutes to make it from the domestic to the international terminal in Houston. I honestly have never run so fast in my life. We made it to the jetway with literally three minutes to spare, and the flight attendants applauded when they saw us bolting for the gate. When we got on board, there were people sitting in our seats and while we stood there waiting for them to move, I almost keeled over sideways into the aisle. It took about half an hour for my heart to stop pounding. CARDIO.

Somewhere along the highway in New York, 2006 or 2007. We were driving back to Pittsburgh from Ontario in the winter, and as everybody who knows the nexus of bad weather that is Buffalo can attest, Buffalo is an infernal hellhole of lake effect precipitation. It snowed harder and visibility got worse as we got past the border...to find that the freeway south had been closed. And all the hotels in the area were booked solid by people who were smarter than we were. "But the Red Cross shelter still has some space," the toll lady said. We elected instead to push on through the snow, until we were the only vehicle on the small road except for monstrous snowplows and ice trucks, passing us like leviathans in the Marianis trench...with just about as much visibility. Still, Jeff was used to driving in Minnesota, and we felt like we were winning against the weather gods as we edged closer and closer to Pittsburgh, certain the lake effect snow would stop once we got far enough from Buffalo. Instead, we hit a patch of black ice, spun out into a snowdrift at an exit ramp and totalled the car. We were all fine, but had to walk up to the toll booth at the end of the exit ramp and wait there while they called a tow truck, which were working overtime from all the accidents. We waited for two hours when a tow truck driver arrived and drove us to the closest hotel he knew of that might have a vacancy. It did. We collapsed into the one small bed and the next morning called a friend in Pittsburgh to drive up and pick us up. The car was a write-off.

I am sure there are more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. I've had surprisingly good luck, given all the travel I do -- let's hope I never have anything worse to add to the list, like my old acquaintance Jessamyn, who was once in a bus in India that rolled off a cliff and she staggered out of it covered in blood that wasn't hers.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

I LOVED this post from meish.org, which is now, sadly, gone...so I crawled it from the Wayback Machine via the Internet Archive. By Meg Pickard.

So, Glastonbury festival is off

So, Glastonbury festival
is off this year. Well, not to worry. Just because Michael Eavis (the
man with an upside-down head) isn't going to oblige, doesn't mean you
have to miss out on all the fun. Just follow my handy tips below, and
with the help of a very obliging friend, you can be well on your way to
recreating the Glastonbury experience in the comfort of your own
home....

Duck out of work early on a thursday, and then go and sit in your
car for seven hours. Don't go anywhere, just sit there. If you have
heating, even better: whack it up to full.

When it gets dark and you're nice and sweaty, go around to the
back of your house and enter by vaulting over a hedge/climbing in the
windows/shinning up the drainpipe. This will be your method of entry and
exit to the house for the next four days.

Arrange in advance to have a friend distribute your furniture,
posessions and various random bits of taut string around the house in
your absence. Also, tell them to remove all your lightbulbs. Upon
entering your home, stumble around blindly for an hour or so before you
find your bed.

Insert four or five large rocks under your matress.

Take an aspirin.

Wait for nothing to happen.

Go to bed.

Arrange for a friend to wake you up by pissing on your duvet.

Eat a mars bar for breakfast.

Go and stand outside your toilet for an hour and a half.

Use toilet (not paper)

Arrange for your friend to stand at the bottom of the garden
holding up a CD jewel case of a band you aren't really that keen on.

For true authenticity, arrange for another friend to stand directly in front of you and shout.

Put the radio on very quietly. Keep this up for six or seven hours.

Queue up beside your kitchen cupboard for two hours.

Pay £4.50 for an authentic Thai meal (pot noodle)

Take an aspirin.

Wait for nothing to happen.

Arrange for your friend to accost you naked on the stairs and jabber wildly at you for an hour.

Stand outside your toilet for an hour.

Give up, go into the garden and pee under a bush.

Repeat steps 12-14.

Throw £15 into your neighbour's garden. Roll up some bay leaves and sage in a rizla. Light. Choke. Repeat.

Monday, June 17, 2013

After spending almost six months cramming it full of French, trying to revive my high school grammar so I can successfully use the subjunctive and don't just sound like I'm either terminally shy or inarticulate while living in Montreal, I decided to take it to Spain. I don't really speak Spanish. I never studied it, in school or elsewhere, and the last time I went to a Spanish-speaking country, my friend Colleen and I were very proud of ourselves that we understood our tour guide when he spoke in the equivalent of kindergarten-Spanish. "THIS...IS...A...VOLCANO," he would say to us, very very slowly. We'd nod our heads, then he would light his walking stick on fire. We couldn't ask why, so we just applauded.

Obligatory photo of the Sagrada Famiglia.

However, apparently, what I *do* speak is Italian. I spent 3 months in Italy when I was 16 years old, and haven't spoken Italian since then. I was actually in the northern part of Italy, in the Dolomiti, the gorgeous rocky mountains famous for being home to Italy's Ladino population, who are famous for not speaking Italian. So I went to Italy and stayed for three months with people who don't speak Italian, and yet somehow managed to pick up enough Italian that my mind very cheerfully said "ARE YOU SURE YOU DON'T MEAN MOLTO BENE INSTEAD OF MUY BIEN?" every time I tried to communicate in Spanish. Basically, I spent my entire time in Spain with my brain throwing out exciting phrases in four languages at once: Spanish, Italian, French, and English. Sometimes I also got some German, which I have also never studied.

Then we went to Morocco, and fortunately, I have forgotten almost all of my vocabulary from my university Arabic classes, so I could be left in relative comfort to speak either English or French. I did spend a few hours on the train to Fes writing out the Arabic alphabet to see if I could remember it (yep, all 4 H's still accounted-for) and my journal is full of little frantically-scrawled notes of "What the hell is the stupid "th" anyway?" (hint: depends on if you mean the soft th or the hard th). So in Morocco, I could read the signs, but not decipher what they meant. Fair enough.

One of the only words I know in Arabic: mdrsa (school)

So Ray and I went to Spain and Morocco. We realized after the trip was over that we had somehow managed to stay in literally every possible sort of residence while we were there. In Barcelona, we stayed with Ray's friends Rob and Aleta, who had recently moved from San Luis Obispo and had almost no furniture in their gorgeous wood-floored Spanish apartment. We sat on the floor around cardboard boxes and they drank wine while I read aloud from the past winners of the Ig Nobel prizes...as you do. In Sevilla, we stayed in our first AirBNB room, a tiny brightly-colored place in Triana, across the river from Sevilla proper and with a lot more character and fewer tourists. Our one night in Tangier was spent in a typical ratbag Moroccan pension, where the beds have been compressed to the density of walnuts by years of people sleeping on them and never having their sheets changed. This pension was right next to the Grand Mosque, which made the middle-of-the-night call to prayer somewhat noisy. It seemed to go on for quite some time, too, after which Ray muttered, "I knew they were doing a call to prayer, but I didn't think they'd be doing the whole service!"

Medina in Fes

In Fes, we stayed in a riad: a super-fancy, super-swanky old-style Moroccan hotel with a central courtyard, elaborately-painted wood ornamentation, zellij tiles, and two extremely friendly Moroccan concierges. We were right around the corner from a hammam, where I ended up drastically overpaying to have a tiny elderly women scrub all the dry skin off my body and then force me to wear someone else's clean underwear back to the hotel. In Marrakech, we found ourselves in a generic mid-level hotel: clean sheets, hot water, and almost nothing else. Right off the Djema el-Fna, it was mostly just our launching point for getting the hell out of Marrakech. After our flight to Essaouria, we found ourselves in a hippie hostel next to the seawall; populated entirely by long-term traveling backpackers, we shared communal meals and someone played guitar and sang literally every night we were there. They had two pet ducks on the roof and encouraged guests to paint on the walls. A quick flight back to Madrid and we spent two nights in an artist's home (again via AirBNB) in Chueca, the gay quarter populated by cheerful Eastern European sex workers checking their phones in 6" heels and tight pants.

Hanging lantern in Green Milk dormitory

Seedlings at Green Milk...isn't Art Mode pretty?

I don't have many Exciting Stories to tell about this trip, really. We saw a lot of Gaudi architecture, and were inspired to create mosaics. We ate a lot of amazing food. Rob and Aleta took us to their favorite restaurant in Barcelona (Bodega La Palma, mmmmm) where they know the waiter. We would order something, and he would bring us something else, saying, "You didn't want that other thing. You want this." A wheel of fresh raw cheese with homemade blackberry jam...he was right, we DID want that. When we ordered dessert, we got tiramisu and then asked him to recommend something. His brow furrowed and his face got serious, then he nodded and wrote something down; it turned out to be nougat ice cream doused with an anise liqueur, so good we almost cried. We staggered out into the street after that, moaning and holding our stomachs. It was worth it. On my birthday in Madrid, I had the best mushroom risotto I have ever had in my life, and some goat cheese and honey ravioli that I would have married if that sort of thing was legal.

Our host's kitchen in Madrid: knives & dudes kissing

In Morocco, we mostly just ate a lot of tagine and doughnuts. Food in Morocco is really only impressive and exciting if you can eat meat and you don't mind consuming your own weight in sugar. The mint tea, for example. I saw a woman make mint tea in her home in Rabat back in 1999; she took her tiny teapot and threw in a handful of tea leaves, then added a sheaf of mint. Then she went to the giant block of refined white sugar in the corner of the kitchen, took what looked like an ice pick and hacked off an enormous chunk, wedged it in the mouth of the teapot, and poured the boiling water over it so it slowly dissolved into the tea below. Mint tea ("Moroccan whiskey") is more like a decorative syrup than a tea.

We spent a lot of time walking. We realized that one day in Sevilla, we walked nonstop for about ten hours. We needed something to do before the restaurants opened for dinner at 10pm, so we just walked and looked at things and talked and sat and ate lunch and walked some more. We found an Ai Wei Wei exhibit and looked at it. We found some cafes and sat in them and read books. Ray fell asleep in an armchair. We found parks and sat in those. We ate gelato. You may notice a theme in this trip. If you did not, let me point it out to you: walking. And eating. That's pretty much it.

Ai Wei Wei: pretty.

After I lost my phone in Sevilla, Ray let me use his camera. This turned out to be a mistake, because I decided my favorite setting was Art Mode, which produces gorgeously supersaturated photos with blown-out colors. The rest of the trip was mostly just us wrestling the camera away from each other and changing the settings back and forth. The photos mostly just look as though we went to two very different places: one looks sort of like Europe, and one looks like the inside of a Disney movie. Say what you will, I like contrast in my photos, god damnit.

Overall, the trip was gorgeous: restful and calm, we spent a lot of time actually BEING ON VACATION, which is something I rarely do. I usually work or plan or develop skills or something, I rarely travel just for the sake of travelling. This was completely unplanned, except for roughly when we wanted to go where, and even that changed when we got to Marrakech and hated it. We kind of sort of knew what we wanted to do, but we played it thoroughly by ear. I haven't been to Spain or Morocco since 1999, so we also spent some time revisiting things I first saw when I was 19 years old, which means I was constantly saying things like "Wow! That's changed a lot!" And then eating a doughnut.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

This is a chunk of diary from my trip to Morocco in 1999, when I met and was travelling with Wolf. Wolf with the curly hair and ice-blue eyes, Wolf who became so radically different when he drank that I didn't understand until years later that he was drunk and abusive, not just emotionally volatile...that I hadn't done something wrong, other than watch him down a bottle of Jack's alone on the beach in Cadiz.But at the time I wrote this journal entry, it was June of 1999 and I was in love, so much in love that I was practically on fire. Not just in the loins region; in the heart, in the letters I wrote home. We'd fled Morocco to Spain briefly, once Wolf finally retrieved his second-time-lost passport. Desperate for cheese and not to be leered at, we wandered the rocky Andalucian coast, slept in a hostel with a green center courtyard in Sevilla, woke up late. But I decided I wanted to be in the Sahara for the last Summer Solstice of the millenium (yes, I know the last year of the millenium was actually 1999, but what were YOU doing in 1999?), and so we made the trek back to Morocco. And I wrote this.

Hair
Wild, Heart Wilder

A solid thirty-four
hours of travel: leaving Sevilla at 6:15 yesterday morning, and going
through Algeciras, Tangier, Meknes, and Rissouni finally got us here,
to the patio of Auberge Tuareg, looking at the amber dunes of the
Sahara desert behind the palm trees. They change color in the light,
so they are never the same twice.

A young man in
Rissouni played his luggage cart as a drum...smiling brightly, and
with a wave to us, he pulled a puppy seemingly out of nowhere and
cradled it against him as he walked away. Desert people are
different people; the hassle in Rissouni was unbelievable, but still
somehow more acceptable than the hassle in Tangier.

Why the rush, you
might ask? Well, because we wanted to be here in the desert for
today, the Solstice; the last summer Solstice of this Millenium, if
you want to let that whole 2000 vs. 2001 thing slide. It was
important to both of us, so important that Wolf told me not to
mention it when we were traveling, in case one of the touts tried to
rook us when he saw our desperation.

The heat is like
riding into a blast furnace but it doesn't bother me as much as it
did before, although I did get dehydrated and sunburned my nose
(again). Now I've drunk about three two-liter bottles of water
("Said Ali" brand, meaning “Mr. Ali”). We saw the sun
rise from the bus—it was very huge and orange over the flat
horizon; the phoenix reborn from fire.

Arriving in
Rissouni early early, we tried to get transport to the dunes
immediately—of course we got fourteen different stories ("Oh,
my friend will leave in an hour, his truck is right here" only
to wait and wait and see neither friend nor imminent departure) and
finally we just took the public bus at 2, and rode on the roof. A
friendly boy told us about it and so we stuck to him like glue, and
were rewarded with watching the dusty desert surround us. Other
trucks crowded with blinking tourists and wrapped-up desert folks
traveling from tiny village to tiny village would careen blindly past
us out of the dust every now and then, but mostly it was sand, and
tire tracks, and the hot, hot sun. Every now and then, a
sand-colored village that looked empty rose up before us. The
windows are cut in archways and the roofs have stepped decorations on
them; a flapping of blackness as the women descend carrying
vegetables or water or whatever it was they needed they couldn't get.
Amazing, to live here in a town that doesn't even have a name.

The city/village of
Merzouga fades right into the desert like a second child ignored by a
vivacious older sibling. It’s an ugly town: grey-tan squat
buildings, all in squares, surrounded by white-bleached dirt,
everything bone-dry and glaring with the reflection of the sun.

Sitting in a cafe
staring out the door at the dunes, they seem to glow. They change
color in minutes, so trying to remember them is hard. "I don't
like sudden changes," he said. Let the slow hot move of time
bury us until we're scuttled over by scorpions and beetles in the
immense desert silence.

The town is ugly,
yes, but you could never call it that to its face. The sky, like
everything else, is bleached white.

We went to the
dunes yesterday night, with water bottles wrapped in our Moroccan
scarves, right before sunset. Night settled like a rock as we
scrabbled through the sand, aiming for the top of a particularly
largish dune. Halfway up, we laid out our clothes in the moonlight
to lie naked, side by side. Too cloudy to see many stars, and the
moon itself was covered soon, leaving us completely wrapped in
darkness.

A windstorm blew
up, almost burying us in sand, but it wasn't frightening, only sandy.
We got dressed and made our way back along the dune ridge, heads
wrapped in scarves, hand in hand, Wolf leading the way. Along the
way, he conversationally mentioned that he was allergic to scorpions;
fortunately, we didn’t meet any.

Back at the hotel,
the staff was playing drums and singing wild droning nasal music and
smoking kif. A boy who remembers Wolf from when he was here before
brought us a double mattress and pillows so we could sleep on the
terrace. Our shower that night was full of grains of sand, as though
it was pieces of our skin or our souls, washing off us and running
down the drain.

A camel walked by
the arched doorway of our hotel, barely visible through another
storm, perfectly framed for an instant. Wolf ran for his camera, but
I only watched as it moved on like a princess: head high, thousands
of years of practice inbred to the very bone.

On the roof of our
auberge, he took me in his arms and was as tender as a new lover,
until I froze. "What is it?" he asked me. "The
owner's son," I said, and there he was, a little grinning man,
standing at the top of the stairs down to the main floor, clearly
ogling us as we lay there. Wolf only smiled, but I cringed at the
thought of him watching us; it would only have taken a few minutes
for him to gather a crowd and sell tickets. In his ardor, Wolf
dragged me across the roof, where the bricks are rough straw: there
is an abraded scratch down my spine from mid-back to hips, raw and
bleeding.

I walked from the
shower to our room without a towel later, five feet and the door was
closed behind me, and his face was incredulous. "What were you
thinking?" he said. "Anyone could have seen you!"

We went walking in
the Hammada, the black desert, which stretches all the way to
Algeria. Acres of volcanic rock dotted with the occasional tan
cluster of houses or tents, or brownish camel. It was so hot with
the sun above and the black desert below that I felt short of breath
and inhaled in gasps through the constant dust storms; there's no
sand in the Hammada, only rock, so the storms are of dust. It’s
the color of late sun, and it gets into everything; your hair, your
eyes, your clothes, your teeth.

Leaning against a
wall at one point and looking up blinking as the storm receded, we
found ourselves surrounded by brightly dressed children and women,
staring and laughing. We inspected a herd of camels (their front
legs are tied up bent so they can't run away) and were invited by
numerous Berber children to shelter in their house for the next
storm. We picked one: mud walls, bamboo-type roof, sticks in the
walls holding clothing, about eight kids. Oceans of tea through
storm after storm. The old man, our host, mixed the tea seven times
for each serving, pouring it out and back into the pot. He gave us
dates, and his son ran out shouting into the storm; he was chasing
their camels, who had somehow broken free and were speedily heading
for the Algerian border on only three legs.

When we got up to
go, the oldest girl blocked our path, demanding first 40 dh and then
100dh. We didn't have much with us, certainly not 100dh, and
mistaking filthy lucre for hospitality made us sad. We gave her what
we had and left, stopping once in another storm for me to pee behind
a dune.

The call to prayer
starts. "No," he says, "I just love your body and
your mind and your spirit."

You are a gift to
me, but I am worried: there is not a gift that exists that is not
more precious when it is given away.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

I walked down St Hubert earlier, with Adam, the biting cold turning our faces red. My scarf was freezing to my upper lip as I breathed; my glasses kept fogging with a thin layer of ice as condensation from my exhalations froze and thawed, froze and thawed. But dizzily, I thought I was in Northbridge. My mind flashed, "We'll pass Gelare up here on the right, and then I can...no, wait..."

Stepping into the metro the other day, I waited for the recorded voice message to say "Station Ploenchit" before realizing I wasn't in Bangkok. I woke up thinking about going to yoga class and, before I opened my eyes, found myself picturing Wild Rose's courtyard, pulling down the ramp on my no-speed bicycle and chaining it to the bamboo fence. I fell asleep a few nights ago wondering why I couldn't hear the Armadale train zipping past every few minutes, and caught myself thinking They must be working on the tracks again.

Part of it is reading "The Slap", a book written by a Greek-Australian that is so vivid in its descriptions of barbecue, driving around, the slang, the attitude, that I find myself shocked when I go outside and encounter the frozen unfamiliar landscape of Canada. I think it's just so different to me, given that I haven't lived here in so very long, that my mind is compensating by throwing up all these other places I've lived and loved, in an effort to make Montreal familiar.

As I was walking towards Mont Royal earlier this evening, a flat of thirty local eggs from Jean Talon market wrapped in newspaper and rattling safely in my backpack, a man stopped me. "Excusez moi," he said, "ou est la station de metro?" Where's the metro station?

I pointed ahead of us. "C'est juste la-bas," I said. It's right over there.